Cometh the hour, cometh the hollow man. Britain is amid its deepest political crisis since the second world war, a crisis that is, in no small part, of Boris Johnson’s making. He lent the leave campaign his feel-good jokes about being pro-having cake and pro-eating it, and served as its cheery, optimistic face, not because he profoundly believed that Britain needed to leave Europe, having indeed told one sincere Brexiter that he had “never been an outer”. No, he made the great leap of his political life, and likely secured the leave camp’s narrow final edge in the process, because of a long-standing, deep-rooted and unshakable conviction that the only fitting address for Boris Johnson was No 10 Downing Street.
On Thursday, however, after taking his ambitions so far as to get 95% of the way through an uncharacteristically conventional candidate launch speech, Mr Johnson announced his “punchline” to stunned journalists, namely that he was not standing after all. He looked – as he continually has since his accidental triumph in a referendum that he had hoped to narrowly lose – tired, nervous and even somehow smaller, as he made prosaic boasts about his mayoral record in reducing road traffic accidents on London’s streets. The harshest verdict would be that he has revealed himself as a vandal, pure and simple – a man who had casually smashed up all the diplomatic arrangements that his country had constructed with its neighbours over 43 years, only to decide that it wasn’t his job to take the lead in figuring out what happens next.
The real story is more complicated. Dread of responsibility may have weighed on Mr Johnson, but it was in fact a lack of support that turned the blond bombshell into a damp squib. Despite cheer-leading billing on the front page of Tuesday’s Sun, wiser colleagues were always wary about his lack of experience at Westminster, and there were recurring doubts concerning what might be described as The Character Thing. It only took the sudden abandonment by Michael Gove on Thursday, an old friend and close comrade in the leave insurgency, for Mr Johnson’s support to start draining away. The justice secretary, who had been all set to chair the Johnson campaign, suddenly offered himself up for the top job he’d always vowed he would never do. The sudden switch from stout backer to backstabber was explained with the eye-catching but sketchy line that he had “come, reluctantly, to the conclusion that Boris cannot provide” the leadership that Britain needs.
Mark Carney on Thursday explained the potential that the Bank of England sees for post-Brexit paralysis to do harm in the labour market, as firms and shoppers keep wallets closed until they have more of a sense of where things are headed. But instead of leadership, still less “taking back control”, the country looks on at Westminster and sees only chaos. The voluntary and parliamentary wings of the Labour party are preoccupied with destroying one another, and the opposition’s shambolic state was affirmed anew on Thursday when, at the launch of a report which aimed to draw a line under a festering row over antisemitism, Jeremy Corbyn suggested an entirely inappropriate comparison between Israel and Islamic State. At the same time, the voters watched the Tories indulge in unseemly jockeying for position – George out, Boris down and Michael in. This soap opera overshadowed the more orderly leadership bid of the home secretary Theresa May, not to mention longer-shot bids by welfare secretary Stephen Crabb, the star Brexiter but junior Andrea Leadsom, and the arch-Thatcherite Liam Fox.
No doubt the well-publicised ambitions of the Gove household were part of the story, but this is about ideas as well as egos. For there are real disagreements on what Brexit means. With a polemicist’s determination to see the argument through, and a zealot’s disregard for the consequences, during the referendum campaign Mr Gove challenged the assumption that a post-EU Britain could perch on the edges of the single market while stumping up fees and accepting the rules, as Norway does, and argued it could instead take back real control over its borders and cease to pay EU subs, if it made a clean break and went down the Albanian route. In his Telegraph article at the start of the week, Mr Johnson sounded more pragmatic, downplaying the significance of immigration in driving the leave vote, and talking only in vague terms about paying less money to Brussels. To committed outers, possibly including Mr Gove, it may have sounded like he was getting ready to sell out.
The root problem here, and the real reason why Britain looks increasingly ungovernable, is that the referendum allowed the public to give the thumbs down to the status quo, without providing assent for anything to go in its place. Indeed, if there was a “leave proposition” it was mendacious, involving the pretence that we could simultaneously, bolt the door, stop paying all EU fees, but continue to trade with it as advantageously as now. In the days since the vote, Angela Merkel has confirmed that it is simply not possible to have all three at once. One way or another, Britain is going to have to choose here, and it may very well be that there is no majority – among the public, or in parliament – for any of the realistic options.
If so, the UK will be snookered – condemned by the referendum to being out of Europe, but without any agreement on a way forward. It is a situation that cries out for serious leadership, to win popular assent for one imperfect path or another. Without it, the country could end up paralysed, and the people feeling betrayed. At Westminster, however, many politicians seem too consumed with betraying each other to care.
